A combination of low-cost broadband networking and digital compression techniques has enabled a widespread deployment of interactive media devices. As part of the interactive media experience, users often input data to the interactive media devices. For example, in the context of an interactive gaming application, a user may input text to answer questions such as a date the user was born.
Many interactive media devices do not include a keyboard. As a substitute, some interactive media devices may provide a virtual keyboard to the user via a user interface. For example, the virtual keyboard may be presented in the form of a traditional keyboard that is projected on a monitor. The user can input text with a controller by navigating a cursor or selection box around the virtual keyboard to select various letters as input data. However, using the virtual keyboard to input data is typically time consuming because the user has to select the desired input from among all possible characters and/or symbols present in the virtual keyboard.
In addition, the virtual keyboard is generally limited to inputting textual data in Western speaking languages, which have a relatively concise alphabet. For East Asian languages in their traditional form such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, however, it is often difficult or impossible to input data using a virtual keyboard due to the number of characters in the language.